Many pundits are fixated on the budget mess in Washington, D.C. and how we are burdening future generations with debt and deficits and that, by virtue of this spending, we are crowding out borrowing that will needed for investments in the private market.  Stephanie Kelton, former chief economist on the U.S. Senate Budget Committee, dares to protest.  She’s not a budget hawk or dove, but rather a budget owl.  Some might say that means she’s has wisdom of new truths and other might say she doesn’t give a hoot about deficits.  In either case you may wonder how she can be so indifferent to what others are so frantic about?  It’s because of the modern monetary theory to which she subscribes and defends in her new book, ‘The Deficit Myth’.  This theory posits that as a currency issuer, the federal government isn’t subject to the same kinds of budgetary constraints as a household.  Rather than asking how to pay for crucial improvements our society needs, as it relates to health care, infrastructure, child care and the like, Kelton says it’s a deficit of policy design and imagination rather than money.  While I have been concerned about debt over many years, consider this.  Did anyone raise their voice on either side of the aisle recently when in combination, monetary stimulus and fiscal stimulus in response to the pandemic, pushed $7 trillion out the door?  Did any deficit hawk say ‘well how are we going to pay for this…what taxes must be raised’?  In fact, the President talked about a payroll tax cut on top of this huge outlay.  This is a fascinating new theory well out side the Keynesian or supply side schools of economics. Recently, Ms. Kelton spoke to Members of Parliament in the United Kingdon about it.  She’s the leading thinker and most visible public advocate of modern monetary theory.  It’s fresh.  It’s bold.  I’d imagine this will be your first exposure to it on our podcast.

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The concept of free trade has gotten a bad name over the recent period as the current occupant of the White House has harpooned recent trade deals made by the United States as stupid and detrimental to the economic fortunes of the country. How can this be so when America wrote a lot of the rules for trade and designed organizations, like the World Trade Organization, establishing the world’s trading framework?  Fred Hochberg, who was the chairman and president of the  Export-Import Bank of the United States for eight years, disputes the many myths, as he sees it, about the issue of trade, thus the title of his new book and this podcast.  He makes some compelling arguments demonstrating the interconnectedness of world commerce and how it has afforded America the opportunity to export high value services, like banking, insurance and technology, in lieu of some of the lower end physical goods that were once made here.  While acknowledging the dislocation that this has wrought in much of America’s heartland, and the important political constituencies impacted, he maintains that overall we have been able to maintain economic dominance in the world while sharing product development and manufacturing with other countries in a new blend.  He points to six particular products as examples and we discuss, in specific, the Honda Odyssey and the taco salad.  We get his views on NAFTA and the successor, USMCA deal, and include China and its trade practices in our conversation.  We also discuss what globalization looks like in(hopefully soon)a post COVID-19 world.

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We’ve all been told that we will no longer have our hands on the steering wheel much longer.  We will be replaced by artificial intelligence and the autonomous vehicle.  Anthony Townsend, author of ‘ Ghost Road’, suggests we slow down the hype about the imminence of that changeover and recognize that this technology may result in us moving more goods than people at the outset.  It’s not that driverless cars won’t be safer and more efficient, but it’s clear from the research that the majority of us remain skeptical and reluctant to join the driverless parade.  So how will the massive investment that tech and car companies are making on this future play out over the next twenty years?  Our guest plays out some very interesting scenarios on this podcast.

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Amazon. How many of us can live without it in this pandemic age? Jeff Bezos and his spinwheel fueled by artificial intelligence(we explain that concept in the podcast) keep accelerating their impact in various sectors of our economy and in our lives. It’s an awe inspiring story, but there are damages in the wake of providing the customer with the largest range of products at the cheapest price at the quickest speed. There are overstressed workers, devastated competitors and hollowed our brick and mortar stores shuttered at the deft hand of Jeff Bezos and Company. How do you compete with the data, speed and size which makes the shopping experience so targeted to the customer with such one click ease? And it’s a company that retains its Day One philosophy that it acts as if it’s a start-up, because on day two that’s when you begin to see complacency set in. The Amazon hand is also into so many product and service lines, some seen and others unseen, that it is almost impossible to escape its growing grip on the nation. In his book, ‘Bezonomics’, author Brian Dumaine describes the culture that just keeps winning and what, if anything, can get in its way as it designs a future that is long-term and never willing to stop innovating.

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On Election Day 2020, we are posting this podcast, recorded on Friday, October 30, recounting the soul searching and internal debates that went on in the Democratic Party as they tried to understand Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in 2016. Is this a conscious and helpful exercise? If you recall, the Republicans did the same after Mitt Romney’s rebuke in 2012. They said that they needed to be more inclusive and reach out to voters not in the GOP tent. And then out of the nominating process in 2016 emerged an insurgent Donald Trump who literally wanted to ‘wall off’ outsiders and yet he won with a message diametrically opposed to that 2012 autopsy by the party. In all of this lies the question as to whether the parties themselves have much control over anything as they have democratized the nominating process to such a degree that more fringe candidates can emerge in the end. In the case of the Democrats in 2020 they emerged looking to stitch back their winning formulas from the past with a more establishment candidate in Joe Biden, who could appeal to a previously reliable part of their coalition–the white working class voter. That stitching together spackles over cracks between moderates and progressives in the party. But will desire to remove President Trump be enough to make it work? We’ll find out in the days ahead. With us to discuss is Seth Masket, author of ‘Learning From Loss: The Democrats 2016-2020’.

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The word populism has been bandied around a lot lately in our politics.  What does it really mean and what evidence do we have that it is a real force in American politics and not just a word co-opted by charlatans to bring people to their side?  In his book, ‘The People, No’, author Thomas Frank gives us a history of anti-populism as the impulse to quell the logic of the mob has often superseded attempts to place authority for decision-making in the hands of the people.  Historically, there are two divergent strains in our politics: the one captured in our founding documents(‘of the people, by the people and for the people’)and the institutions built to insure that the republic is not a direct democracy in many ways, like the Electoral College and the selection of the U.S. Senate, first by state legislatures and now with equal representation for all states big and small, as prime examples.  Those who have amassed great wealth and power historically have had great disdain for the common man, feeling that by birth, pedigree and training they can make better decisions than the masses.  At the same time, owing to a slew of bad decisions by so-called ‘experts’, people have lost faith in their judgment.  The last true populist president we had, according to Frank, was Franklin D. Roosevelt.  He made major institutions, like banks, change their practices to benefit the general welfare of the people.  As the word gets more popular in these times, what does populism look like today and which politicians really are practitioners of it?  Find out on this podcast.

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There’s been a ten year study done of women who had an abortion and women who were turned away at a clinic because they missed the deadline to have one.  The intent was to see the impact that this decision had on these two groups over a long sweep of time.  The Turnaway Study is the largest ever to examine women’s experiences with abortion and unwanted pregnancies in the United States.  Diana Greene Foster is the principal researcher on the project and also the author of a book on the study.  The book is titled ‘The Turnaway Study’ and it describes the results and methodology  and illustrates many women’s stories.  In general it finds that many of the common claims about the detrimental effects on women’s health of having an abortion are not supported by the evidence.  For example, women who have an abortion are not more likely than those denied the procedure to have depression or anxiety.  This podcast goes beyond the contours of the study to look at the issue of abortion in current day America.

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  The nation’s pharmaceutical companies have worked very hard to make themselves indispensable to the world’s most medicated society. They have done it by selling cures and treatments for a range of conditions, accenting the positive and downplaying the side effects which, as in the case of opioids, often are catastrophic.  Further, they have marketed aggressively and lobbied hard throughout their history to overcome waves of controversy around a host of products.  In the beginning, they marketed all manner of narcotics, unregulated at the time, like heroin which Bayer promoted for an array of ills from cold and coughs to asthma and epilepsy.  And while safeguards have gotten stronger, according to famed investigative journalist, Gerald Posner, left to their own devices they will over promote, over promise and overmedicate whenever the opportunity presents itself. In his new book, ‘Pharma: Greed, Lies and the Poisoning of America’, he uncovers in vivid detail the fascinating history of this industry and the names that have become synonymous with our lives–like Merck and Pfizer.  And we are reminded that for every Jonas Salk, there’s an Arthur Sackler, of the notorious Purdue Pharma company, ready to ride a wave like the pain management focus of the recent period to an unmitigated opioid calamity, all in the pursuit of profit.  So where does this history lead us as we await a curative or vaccine from this same industry to find a way out of the coronavirus pandemic in which we find ourselves?  And if we are able to conquer this virus, have we prepared ourselves adequately for the many bacterial strains waiting to become the next pandemic?  This podcast is riveting.  He’s as good a storyteller as he is a journalist and author.

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In 1992, when Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporters, Donald L. Bartlett and James B. Steele, set out to first determine what had gone wrong with America’s promise for its people economically and socially they found troubling signs of pervasive inequality and the public sector weakened to a point where it was unable to craft new policies to address the problems. They documented the impacts on people’s lives with hard evidence. With the passage of time, they saw those trends worsening and set about to document a growing problem in their updated 2020 edition of their book, ‘America: What Went Wrong? The Crisis Deepens’. This portrayal finds an economy in which millions of Americans find their wages stagnant, their health care unaffordable and the prospect of an impoverished retirement. This no accident. America’s tax policy and indifference to many who have a weak political voice has brought us to this point. And recent events have only made matters worse and shone a bright light on these issues. Our guest, James Steele, explains how we got here over the course of the last four decades.

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Daily we are bombarded with one scientific finding after another. How often have you quoted this or that finding to a friend and suggested that a change of behavior might be in order as a result? Stuart Ritchie, author of ‘Science Fictions’ suggests that you may want to curb your enthusiasm to insure that the study has not been tainted by fraud, bias, negligence or hype. Mr. Ritchie is a man of science and doesn’t fall in with the anti-science types who have loud megaphones these days on vaccines and climate change. He is concerned, however, that even science published in prestigious journals often turns out to be faulty after further review. It gives the layman much to ponder about what to believe. Aside from corporate directed science we need to be skeptical, like good scientists, that the purported findings have been as rigorously arrived at as we would have hoped.

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